The drugs cheat walked into plum jobs with ESPN and the Yankees as soon as he retired. He probably figured everything would be OK

I have many questions about the story of Alex Rodriguez and the half-million-dollar car burglary.

The slugger-turned-pariah-turned-broadcaster is said to have lost valuables of at least US$500,000 when the rental vehicle he parked at Oracle Park in San Francisco was relieved of its contents.

Does Rodriguez handle the rental himself? It is fun to imagine that A-Rod, who made US$452-million playing baseball, and I, who has made rather less than that, could have a shared life experience of travelling somewhere to cover a sporting event and picking up a car to get to the stadium. Does he take the courtesy shuttle from the airport to the rental lot? Does he have the same pang of doubt when he declines the extra insurance coverage? Does he, standing there as one person with one suitcase, wear the same puzzled expression when asked if he wants a much bigger vehicle? Or does he just automatically get upgraded because he hit 696 home runs in the majors? Maybe the whole pariah thing cancels that out. Reports suggest the rental vehicle was an SUV, so maybe he did get the upgrade. Maybe A-Rod just likes to stretch out.

So many questions, and we haven’t even gotten to what was in the vehicle. Did Rodriguez stick a diamond-encrusted Rolex in the centre console? Or several diamond-encrusted Rolexes? A local paper reports that the loot included a camera, laptop, electronics and jewellery. Even allowing for the possibility of some very valuable photo and computer equipment, Rodriguez must have left some serious bling somewhere in the car. Had he never seen a ‘Please Don’t Leave Valuables in Your Car’ sign? Even crazier: the vehicle was not left in a VIP lot at the stadium or even a regular lot with some kind of attendant. It was three blocks from Oracle Park. HE PARKED ON THE STREET. A-Rod, you sweet, dumb weirdo.

Perhaps this is all the somewhat inevitable result of a guy who has led a truly strange life since he was a teenager being suddenly forced to try to integrate into normal society. Professional athletes are sheltered from having to do such things as finding parking from a young age. But all kinds of them do manage to retire, find other jobs, and not immediately become laughing stocks.

Alex Rodriguez in action against the Blue Jays in Toronto, Ont., on Tuesday April 12, 2016.Craig Robertson/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network

Maybe Rodriguez just assumed that no one would break into his car because things always seem to have a bizarre way of eventually working out for him. This is a guy who somehow has been re-embraced by the upper reaches of Major League Baseball even though he is one of the sport’s absolute worst steroid cheats.

That is, admittedly, a subjective label. But it is worth reviewing the story. About a dozen years ago, he insisted in a soft-focus national television interview that he had never taken steroids, not even a bit, when rumours first circulated that he had been snagged years earlier in a random MLB drug test that was supposed to remain anonymous. A decade ago, as a member of the New York Yankees, he then admitted that he had taken drugs, but for just a couple of seasons, when he was young and naïve and had just signed a record-breaking contract with the Texas Rangers. He felt pressure to live up the contract, the poor soul, and also everybody was doing it so you couldn’t really blame him. But he swore up and down that he had been clean as a surgical instrument in the years since. He kept on insisting that even as the Biogenesis scandal unfolded in the middle of this decade, when MLB, using admittedly shady investigative methods of their own, discovered that a number of ball players had been on steroid programs administered by a Florida anti-aging clinic.

He felt pressure to live up the contract, the poor soul, and also everybody was doing it so you couldn’t really blame him

Rodriguez maintained his innocence, appealing his 211-game MLB suspension — by far the largest ever in any sport — and playing through the end of the 2013 season, while all of his co-accused took their suspensions and sat the hell down. At an arbitration hearing the following off-season, when it became evident that Antony Bosch, his steroid guru, was co-operating with MLB and had all the goods and then some on Rodriguez, he pitched a fit in the room, stormed out and went straight to a New York radio station, where he insisted that the whole thing was an outrage and a farce and a sham.

And then a couple months later he dropped his appeal (and a lawsuit against MLB) and sat out a reduced 162 games. Mere weeks after that, he co-operated with federal drug agents who were after Bosch and Biogenesis, and confessed everything. The whole wild story was told in the 2018 documentary Screwball, from filmmaker Billy Corben, in which Rodriguez proves to have been an enthusiastic steroid user and an even more enthusiastic liar.

A lot of ESPN footage is used in the documentary — it’s on Netflix in Canada now — to document Rodriguez’s fall, which is a bit of delicious irony given that ESPN would later hire him to join the booth for its flagship Sunday Night Baseball program. It’s that job he was doing when his car, and all that wealth, was stolen on the weekend.

Steroid users occasionally come off as sympathetic, victims of their own ignorance or momentary bad judgement. Rodriguez is at the absolute other end of the scale: he cheated early and he cheated late, and he insisted he was a victim right up until he needed the truth to spare himself prosecution.

This is the guy who then gets one of baseball’s biggest media platforms, and a job as an adviser with the Yankees. No doubt the man feels like nothing bad will happen to him. I wonder if he even locked his car.

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